6 travelers at this place:

This New Mexico city is known for a vibrant arts scene, as historic and culturally important for Native Americans, Spanish settlers and rail enthusiasts. You may remember Jesse and his girlfriend visit the Georgia O'Keefe gallery on Breaking Bad, Albuquerque is about an hour south of here.

4 hours on the coach from Durango. Unfortunately it was Joanne's turn for a hangover... someone had to christen the lavatory on the bus (wasn't the only one). Any other day we would have been all over the museums, galleries and historic places in Sante Fe.

We did make it to the St Francis of Assisi Basilica and the the oldest church in the US which was a Spanish mission built in the 1600s. Evidence of Native American inhabitants dating back to the 1300s was also found on the site during restoration.

Sante Fe also features oldest house in the US, many of the modern homes and buildings are designed in adobe style and they can only be coloured brown (30 official shades to choose from).

We enjoyed street food in the plaza for lunch and the whole group went to Blue Corn Brewery for dinner and some more Mexican cuisine Mmm mmmm!

We're a bit behind on blog entries as we haven't had any down time and the photos etc are across 3 devices. Yesterday we had some bad luck, Josh's memory card in his phone stopped working, hopefully we can retrieve the photos. Expect the dates on posts to jump around a bit. We have 4 hours on the coach today and 8 hours tomorrow to hopefully catch up!Read more

We started the day with an early morning run around the lava field, as you do! Then we cruised on up to Albuquerque and finally started getting out of the
Chihuahuan desert and into the hills. After the amazing petroglyphs in Texas we had high hopes for Petroglyph National Monument, but were pretty underwhelmed by the 400-700 year old graffiti (we are now petroglyph snobs!) - if you see the photos you will understand...

The CRAZY driving and Friday night traffic put us off a quick stop off in Albuquerque and we overnight in another really nice public campground in the edge of town which even had its own casita. In the morning we decide to drive the looooong way round to Santa Fe but 15 minutes into the drive up into the massive mountains it said the pavement (aka the road to any 'normal' people) stopped, so we thought Elvis wouldn't thank us for that we bailed and ended up on the Interstate (which we have mostly avoided up to now).

As we were in the middle of the Texan desert for our anniversary we decided to splash out in Santa Fe and have booked into a hotel (to be honest it cost us $30 as I cashed in loyalty points, but don't tell Jo)! We spent the day meandering through the beautiful old city of Santa Fe, with its amazing adobe buildings, buying lots of native Indian jewellery, and enjoying a few cold ones on a terrace overlooking the main square. Tonight we are having a posh meal out and a night on the town.Read more

Yeah, At least Wal-Mart serves a purpose once in a while, campers can always stay free, you seem to be always on the move, have you had time to do some seroius hiking? Are most parks open? It's one thing to see the sights on TV , but to live them firsthand is always so fascinating, we are always humbled by Mother Nature and what she gives us...keep on truckin' (old sixties rant) and be safe...luv, PapaJim